'Croma on turnaround path as losses narrow, quality of growth gets better': CEO

Kolkata: Tata Group-owned Infiniti Retail, the operator of electronics retail chain Croma, is on a firm turnaround path, sharply pruning losses, closing more unprofitable stores than usual and driving companywide cost efficiencies, said Shibashish Roy, chief executive.

Roy told ET the company will pursue measured expansion, including opening 'Edge by Croma' small-format neighbourhood stores, focused on mobile phones and personal gadgets such as laptops, tablets and accessories. The network will be rolled out nationally in phases after initial testing.

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Infiniti Retail, which has been a sustained challenge for the Tata Group, turned operationally profitable in FY26. The company swung to an operating profit of ₹159 crore from an operating loss of ₹235 crore in FY25. This sharply narrowed the company's net loss to ₹614 crore from ₹1,091 crore in FY25. Total income grew 13% to ₹21,784 crore in FY26, with sales growth nearly doubling from the previous year.

"The biggest achievement was maintaining top line growth, and a better quality of this growth whereby we improved our margin last fiscal," said Roy. "That is where the big magic has been." Growth was broad-based across categories, while a reduction in goods and services tax (GST) rates from the second half of FY26 also helped lift consumer sentiment and volumes, he said.

Infiniti Retail shut 35 unviable stores last fiscal after giving them "a significant chance to succeed". In some cases, stores had been opened ahead of the catchment's development, while in others, the local market wasn't ready for modern retail, Roy said. Infiniti Retail operates about 560 stores and plans to add 40-45 this fiscal, split almost equally between large-format Croma stores and the smaller Edge by Croma outlets.

The company has also undertaken "structural changes" to lower costs, with greater focus on granular tracking of expenses and productivity. "Continuous cost optimisation is now a habit in the business," Roy said.

The electronics industry, however, faces fresh headwinds, with smartphones and laptops seeing monthly price increases and televisions and appliances becoming more expensive amid memory-chip shortages inflating prices, higher raw material and freight costs linked to the West Asia crisis, and a sharply weaker rupee resulting in higher cost of imported parts.

Smartphone volumes fell more than 10% in the calendar year so far as prices jumped 30-40%, while sales of appliances and televisions grew in single digits.